


And All Should Cry, Beware! Beware!

by OldSwinburne



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Horror, Literary References & Allusions, Martin Blackwood's Poetry, Monster Martin Blackwood, Multiple Crossovers, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:27:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24623179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldSwinburne/pseuds/OldSwinburne
Summary: When the Eye decides to select a new Avatar, it chooses Martin Blackwood, the Poet, rather than Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Martin Blackwood’s Mother
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	And All Should Cry, Beware! Beware!

_And all who heard should see them there,_

_And all should cry, Beware! Beware!_

_His flashing eyes, his floating hair!_

_Weave a circle round him thrice,_

_And close your eyes with holy dread_

_For he on honey-dew hath fed,_

_And drunk the milk of Paradise._

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s _Kubla Khan_ (1816)

  
  


In hindsight, the first mistake Martin Blackwood made was to read his poetry on those damn tape recorders. They were appealingly chunky, blocky things, straight out of an analogue era; they gave his poetry an appealingly ‘low-fi charm’. He would listen back to the stanzas distorted in his own voice, the crackle of inferior technology almost comforting.

It was something to do, anyway, after hours when he was camped out in the Archives. Surrounded by old papers containing older horrors, there was an element of protest in pushing his own creations, his own stories, out there. It started off with limericks and haikus, little off-the-cuff things devised running around on errands for Jon. Then sonnets and ballads, _terza rima_ and villanelles. He’d experimented with blank verse for a while, but the lack of a rhyme scheme left him feeling rather unmoored. There was a specific recorder he liked to use, with a handle and satisfyingly large buttons and a transparent cover so you could see the magnetic strip of the tape trundling merrily along. 

They cheered him up, really, and it was a way to ward off the empty black fingers of depression. On days when his mother had been particularly cruel, when the agonies of migraines beat against his sore temples, he resorted to casting metrical spells in his notebooks. On that wet autumnal Tuesday, it had been particularly bad. His mother had woken up in a black mood, hurling abuse at him after he had knocked over one of her potted plants. Sometimes, Martin felt too _large,_ an oafish lumbering idiot who broke his mother’s pottery and took up too much damn _space._ On that morning he had blundered through the carefully arranged stone circle his mother had set up, the one that was supposed to ward off ill tidings. “ _Can’t you do anything right?”_ Merricat Blackwood had screamed, flecks of spittle flying off her wrinkled lips. _“I wish you were dead like your uncle, and I was walking on your body.”_

The apartment Martin and his mother lived was full of straw dollies, strange-shaped rocks, and old books nailed to the walls, a testament to Merricat’s paranoia. Every morning she went down to the bottom of her garden to check her array of crystals, and to polish the bottles that contained the paper cuttings of fairies. It was impossible to say whether these objects had any effect against the Fears that stalked the land, but it was true that the whole sorry affair started when Martin broke half of them.

Martin Blackwood, heart and head smarting, approached the Magnus Institute, a decrepit building of greying colonnades sandwiched between two buildings on the Thames Embankment. He entered, hung up his coat, and headed straight to the kitchen, where he put the kettle on in a fluid motion born from years of muscle memory. The truth was, he liked taking care of people; it made him feel actually useful, and making the tea was one of the few things he knew how to do, and which everyone appreciated. 

Well, almost everyone.

“What do you _want,_ Martin?” snapped Jon, looking up from his statement. Martin felt tears prickle his eyes. _Useless._

“Just some tea, Jon. Freshly made, just the way you like it,” Martin warbled, trying to avoid disappointing his boss-and-maybe-crush.

“If I _wanted_ tea, Martin, _I would make it myself._ And can’t you hear when I’m working? If I’m going to solve the mess you made when you misfiled the Justin Somerton statement, then I need absolute silence.”

“Right, sorry-- yes, sorry--,” Martin muttered obsequiously, bowing and scraping out of the room like a nervous courtier. He turned to the kitchen counter, putting the mug down and trying not to cry. He noticed amidst the haze that it was one of his favourite mugs, a red and yellow number emblazoned with the words ‘You Don’t Have To Be Mad Too Work Here, But It Helps’.

“Boss-man just as pleasant as ever, I see?” said Tim, pretending to ignore the red around Martin’s eyes. He was leaning back on his swivel-chair with his feet on the desk, three-quarters of the way through a box of Quality Street. 

“Hah hah,” replied Martin, enunciating the syllables in the manner of a man too strung out to laugh.

Tim unwrapped a caramel swirl and flicked the yellow wrapper into the bin. “Want one? I think Sasha snaffled the last of the strawberry delights, but you can have one of the other flavours if you want.” Tim pouted as Martin shook his head. “Never mind. Anyway, I think Elias wanted to speak to you in his office.”

Martin drooped slightly. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“No, but he looked just as disagreeable as ever. I don’t know whether that’s a good sign or not.”

Martin nodded, and began to slowly ascend the stairs. He always dreaded seeing Elias. There was something about his starchy demeanor that reminded him unpleasantly of his old school teacher, and a little of his absent phantom father. Ignoring Tim’s jubilant cry of “Give him all my love!”, Martin opened Elias’ door.

The office of Elias Bouchard was older than the rest of the institute, which relied on installations from grants from the ‘60s to maintain some semblance of modernity. The office meanwhile was an oak-panelled affair, with portraits of past Institute alumni staring down at Martin like the jury in his own personal courtroom. There was James Wright, heavy-set with NHS glasses, and Jonah Magnus, with greying hair and an extravagant cravat. An austere woodcut seventeenth century occultist Count Magnus de la Gardie was also present, leering down at those that passed below.

“Martin,” Elias declamed, paging through densely-written documentation and casting a dismissive Eye at the archival assistant. “You’ve been with us for several months, haven’t you?”

Martin was surprised, but really he should have known better. “I’ve been an employee for the Institute for the past seven years, sir.”

“I’m sure, but you’ve only been an Assistant to the Archivist for a short period, hmmm?” He pronounced the words with a special reverence that Martin did not fully understand, as if they were a holy order rather than an occupation title.

“That is true, sir.”

“I’ve heard some things about your productivity, Martin. Some negative and very concerning things,” Elias steepled his fingers, leaning forward so his face was in shadow. Martin blinked.

“Is this a performance review, sir?”

“Everything is a performance review, Martin. But yes, this in particular matches that description. I’ve uncovered some inconsistencies with your _curriculum vitae,_ aheheh. Some rather _fascinating_ errors that speak of a certain… elasticity with the truth.”

Martin couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe past the growing ache in his throat. After so long with the paranoia of his CV and his lies weighing him down, it was almost a relief to be discovered; almost, but for the stabbing pain of _not-good-enough_ rising through his gorge like bile. Martin made a gasping noise, and inarticulate cry of terror, and Elias grinned a shark-like grin of poor pleasure.

“Oh ho, don’t worry, Mr Blackwood. We can still use you, just in a different capacity. It takes a lot to trick the Eye, and you are certainly more malleable than dear Jon. A change of plans-- but yes, that could work well.”

He gently pushed Martin’s head up, creating unbroken Eye contact between the two. With the other hand, he took a tape recorder from his desk drawer, and set it to record. The tape began its usual whirring clink.

“Now, my dear Poet, why don’t you tell me what you really feel about your life?”

And so Martin, buffeted by the harsh winds of reality, fell like so many before him into poetry. He let spill all his emotions, his beliefs into the tape recorder. As he spoke, strange visions and dreams began running through his head. Dreamt of the infinite dream-palace of Xanadu, where widths and lengths warp in strange ways; dreamt of the ancient god-king Ozymandias, his kingdom crumbled into nothing; dreamed of the prophetic death toll of the midnight raven, cawing just past his chamber door. He poured his heart and soul into the whimsies of poesy, forcing what made him human into the rigid rhyme scheme, and the Eye

  
  


devoured 

  
  


him 

  
  


whole

In theory, Martin Blackwood appeared just the same as normal. He still had his dense bottle-neck glasses on, eyes blinking uncertainly behind them. He had his badly-knitted cardigan on, the one with the grotesque grinning snowman on it, and he still had the slightly scruffy growth of beard that had always irritated the clean shaven Jon. But there was a sense of etherality about him, as if the rest of the room had been subtly desaturated. His eyes glowed with an inner knowledge, and as he looked at Elias Bouchard it was not just Martin that was looking out.

And so as downstairs Jonathan Sims, Tim Stoker and Sasha James went about their work, they did not know that the Eye had found an Avatar; and that the ancient elf-song of the poet had found a new Voice.

* * *

  
  


Statement of Tabitha Dickinson, regarding her encounter with poetry.

Original Statement given 12th of October, 2016.

Audio Recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

_I suppose you could say it all started with having a few too many at the local. And yes, I know how that sounds. Spooky experiences following a night on the town? It’s a cliche. I’m sure you have tonnes of files starting out in similar ways. Yes, I know about you at the Magnus Institute. My captor had some glowing things to say about your Archivist. But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?_

_I’m an Art Critic. I write a weekly column for_ The Daily Beast _, reviewing local theatre productions and art installations that occur in London’s bohemian circles. None of my reviews are exactly viral- I refuse to pander to the popular audience-baiting rants of my lesser colleagues- but I’m relatively well known in the business. Ask around for long enough and someday will have heard of me. I hope, anyway. I used to review Broadway plays until I moved to the West End a few years ago after I fancied a change of pace._

 _Critics are a superstitious lot. We spend a lot of our time studying actors, and everyone knows that actors have a dozen little omens of ill fortune rattling about in their heads, so I suppose some of it must have stuck. There was the rumours of that old play,_ The King in Yellow, _that caused those sudden deaths among the decadents of the Gay ‘90s, and I had heard there was a film directed by James Incandenza that made the viewers lose all interest in anything else until they eventually died. Carl Streator, who I used to work with, went to prison after claiming that a song in a copy of_ Songs and Rhymes from Around the World _was able to kill people. And there has been stuff I’ve reviewed that was genuinely weird and upsetting. I’m still not sure whether_ The Navidson Record, _the film that made its way around the festival circuit back in ‘92 was real or a well-made hoax, and I only got halfway through watching Sadako Yamamura’s home video, which I thought was in very poor taste._

_So yeah, we try to keep each other in the loop. I never really believed in it, though. It’s all circumstantial evidence, indicative of mass hysteria and practical jokes. I met Streator a couple of times, and it was all nonsense, really. There’s only so many bad horror films you can marathon before you start believing some of it. But I’m not a sceptic anymore, and that’s a story in itself._

_Like I said, I work for_ The Daily Beast _. We’re not a large enough organisation that we can afford to have critics reviewing different things, so I do a bit of everything. Films, television, books. Opera, art galleries, theatre. If there’s a grand opening of some museum exhibit or something, I’ll be there, pencil and notepad in hand. The only thing I won’t do is anything connected with sports, as I’m not the athletic type. I sometimes wish I was- it would have helped me then. But on the day it all went down I had gone to a grand reopening at one of the bookshops in the nicer half of London. It was a pokey little thing called ‘The Travel Book Co.’- not my cup of tea, as I mainly go for second hand fiction and these were brand new travel guides. I had met the owner before at a red carpet event on the arm of his much more famous actress wife, and he was much as I remember him. He had floppy hair and a kind of bumbling British manner that I was determined not to find charming. As a gesture for the press, he had offered a free copy of whatever book you could pick out. The book I selected was tucked away behind several volumes of Grecian architecture and a guide to the tourist hotspots of Turkey. It was a thin paperback with the type of glossy cover that signified that it was from an independent publishing imprint._

_Inside was an array of poems, some typed, some handwritten, some in a scratchy blue font. I won’t lie, they were largely mediocre. Clearly, the writer had started out with traditional sonnets before transitioning to the modern avant-garde fad. One was just a mess of garbled typeface that seemed to broadly ape e e cummings with none of the original’s subtlety and wit. There was potential, though, something that with time might have materialised into art worth appreciating. One poem in particular struck me. I can’t remember it now as it refused to stick in my mind, but I remember the sheer agony the damn thing caused, the vivid memories of girlhood days spent with my sister, of apple pie days and autumn nights. I became transfixed with the poem, and the floppy-haired shop owner interrupted me with a mumbled imprecation and a handkerchief. Apparently, there were tears streaming down my face._

_I left the shop with the book shortly after, and walked home in something of a daze. There was an address scribbled in the inside leaf, which I made a note of, but it wasn’t until several days passed that I went there. I knew, even then, that the visit would change me._

_The address was for a cheap little flat in Dagenham, to which I approached with a strange sense of trepidation. There was nothing out of the ordinary with the building; in fact, it was quite the opposite. The doormat had a cheery ‘Home Sweet Home’ emblazoned on it and there was a bunch of wisteria in one of the window boxes. Nevertheless, there was something eerie about the place, a sense of not-quite-right. What was it that Freud said?_ Das Unheimliche?

_Without knowing what prompted me, I pressed an ear against the door. Inside, there was a melodious sound that I recognised from the poetry book. It was melodic, soporific, resembling more a pagan chant than traditional verse. It was spoken in a pleasantly light voice, one that seemed friendly on the surface, but which gave me a feeling of bald panic, like a rabbit staring down the barrel of a gun. I was listening to the poetry for what felt like hours but was probably closer to a couple of minutes when, in a moment of vaudeville comedy, the door opened, striking me badly on the forehead._

_The man who opened the door- who cooed an immediate apology- was oversized, plumb with an ill-fitting cardigan that made him seem even larger. His thick spectacles made it difficult to see his eyes, distorting them in unusual ways, but they looked at me with a placid indifference._

_“Goodness,” said the man, smiling good-naturedly. His expression would have put me at ease, but there was something_ off _about it. His eyes were slightly unfocused, pupils blown wide, and he didn’t seem to realise I was there at all. It was as if he was talking to someone else entirely. He put one hand flat against my forehead, testing for a fever, and gave a school-ma’am_ tssk. _“That’s a nasty bump. I could make you some Chamomile, if that’s alright.”_

_I don’t remember being invited in, but I closed my eyes and when I opened them I was swaddled in blankets in the living room of the house, holding a mug that said ‘World’s #1 Son’._

_“I could crush some paracetamol into it, if you wanted,” said the man. “I find that normally wards off the worst of the migraine. Or Lemsip-- I think we have some in one of the cupboards.”_

_I found my voice._

_“No thanks,” I said, taking a sip. It tasted bitter, red berries with a saltier tang._

_“So,” the stranger said, giving a too-wide smile. “What brings you here?”_

_I decided to dispense with any pretence. Already, the strange atmosphere was wearing down on me. I just wanted to get out. “I found this poetry book, and it told me to come here. Did you write it?”_

_The Poet smiled, and began speaking in a melodic tone, as if reciting from a long-forgotten tome. I don’t remember all he said, his words sliding out of his memory like they had with his poetry book, but I remember the room growing hazy, and when I looked out of the windows it was already dark. I didn’t think this strange at the time; it was like during a dream, where strange and horrifying things happen and you accept them as a mildly interesting distraction._

_Legs heavy weights, I made a lunge for the nearest door in a burst of panic. The other room was dark, only lit by the flickering solitary bare bulb that hung like a noose from the ceiling. Little moths flew around it, fascinated by the light. The illumination revealed an old woman slumped in a wheelchair. Her hair was a patchwork of rainbow colours, her eyes wide with fear and disgust._

_“This is my mother, Mary Kate Blackwood,” said the Poet. “But we call her Merricat. She used to stay at a care home in Devon, but We decided that it was safer for everyone if she stayed with me, where I Can Take Care Of Her.”_

_Merricat rolled her wheelchair backwards, snarling like a cornered dog. The younger Blackwood was nothing but caring to his mother, but it was her reaction, the sheer bald-minded terror in her face, that set my teeth on edge._

_“You’ve always been a parasite, Martin Blackwood,” snarled the mother. “It’s only now that your outsides match your insides.”_

_And Martin_ smiled, _like a cat holding a mouse squirming bloodily in its jaws. He began to speak, and what he said was not like any poetry I had heard. It was both beautiful and terribly, terribly true, a taste of the sublime in an ill-fitting cardigan. It reminded me of Wordsworth in_ The Prelude, _the boat that his childhood self stole sculling across the waters of the Lake District, the terrifying mountains looming out of the mists like primordial giants. It reminded me of the Ancient Greek poets of Hesiod and Homer, bards who would recite with glowing eyes pages and pages of prose to an enraptured audience. And there was something before that, the first men speaking rhyme to each other over the campfires, keeping out the dark evil eyes that lay beyond the circle of light. It was poetry, pure and simple, and it was older than mankind._

_I began to lose sense of time at that point. Days and weeks flowed into each other, and I began to remember things backwards and the wrong way round. Have you ever wondered what a poem feels when you read it? At first glance, you skim through it the right way, but then you double back on yourself, reread the bits you like, dismantle it, submit each word choice to surgical analysis. That’s what it is to be a critic, to remove the patina of mysticism about poetry and expose its inner workings. And that is what was happening to me. I felt seen, my inner feelings, internal monologue, emotions, every action I’ve ever undertaken gazed at by a terrible Eye. My trauma became notations in some horrible book of poesy for the world to see. My childhood scars of almost drowning, my messy breakups, the worst reviews I’ve inflicted on others and the worst things I’ve seen. I was suddenly in my past again, the time that terrible old man Simon Fairchild grabbed ahold of Riggan Thomson and sent him sprawling into the sky, wings fluttering behind him in a sick parody of Icarus._

_I don’t know how I escaped. In my heart of hearts, I don’t know_ if _I escaped. I think that I grabbed a mug and threw it at Blackwood, giving him a baptism of lukewarm Chamomile, and vaulted through the window. I don’t know, though. I have a horrible feeling I’m still in that room, another invalid for Blackwood to look after, another poem for that terrible Eye to tear apart. I dream that I escaped, that I came to the Magnus Institute to give this statement._

_But I don’t think I did._

_I don’t think I will be reviewing poetry for quite some time._

  
  
  



End file.
